Children are literally saddled with the sadness and possibly the sins of their off-screen elders in Gottfried Helnwein’s haunting portrait of a child in military uniform. Helnwein’s doe-eyed child is half in shadow, one side of the face possibly bruised; the design on her jacket lapel suggesting a military uniform.

Untitled (Modern Sleep)

oil and acrylic on canvas, 2005, 199 x 132 cm / 78 x 51''

About the Exhibition

Rituals—religious and cultural, institutional and domestic—provide the thematic infrastructure for OFF-SPRING: New Generations.
Exploring the development of both personal and group identity,
childhood, family, history, and gender politics, these sculptures,
paintings, photographs, and videos employ iconographic imagery to reveal
how we learn to live, love, work, and dream in the 21st
century. In the family home, at the wedding altar, or in the classroom,
within the fantasy of childhood play or the familiarity of grown-up
habit, these new, old narratives generate a spectrum of meditations on
the contemporary construction of self and society.

The weight of both the future and the past encumbers much of the
variously angelic, endangered, and enigmatic figures featured in OFF-SPRING.
Imaginary play is rendered as both enchanting and uncanny in
photographs by Adriana Duque, Loretta Lux, Vee Speers, Laetitia Soulier,
Oleg Dou, Anthony Goicolea Nathalia Edenmont, and others. Both Duque
and Lux transform their young subjects to create painterly portraits
that reference art history, alluding to Rembrandt, Velázquez, Piero
della Francesca, and others, while the make-up and costumes worn by
models in works by Dou, Speers, and Edenmont belie more than the joy of
dress-up, their faces and poses introducing the presence of the uncanny.
Drawing on memories of her own anguished teenage years, when her
mother’s death left her orphaned, Nathalia Edenmont casts a young model
as her doppelganger, dressed and posed as if awaiting or recovering from
a transformative rite of passage, captured in color-saturated images of
macabre beauty. The rites and trials of adolescence animate Anthony
Goicolea’s boy-world, in which mysteriously uniformed, hooded, and
masked young males participate in group-rituals that range from
fairytale-like to menacing. The youthful Tree Dwellers may be engaged in temporary play or permanent encampment; the boys gathered round Fireside are presided over by a single, male adult in an image derived from Goicolea’s film, Kidnap, which depicts mysterious, ritual-like events as both innocuous and ominous.

Guy Ben-Ner projects a playful imagination in his video narratives,
which feature his own young family in fantastical scenarios from
literature, history, and nature. Ella—a story of an Ostrich Chick
features the artist’s daughter and other family members in ostrich
costumes, navigating their way through a wilderness that is actually New
York’s Central Park. In naturalist imitation of ostrich locomotion, the
costumes are worn backwards, making movement awkward, especially for
the young lead. Ben-Ner’s home movie explores contemporary family
dynamics and our sanitized relationship with the natural world, while
alluding to the burdens borne by children cast in roles, on stage and
off.

Children are literally saddled with the sadness and possibly the sins
of their off-screen elders in Gottfried Helnwein’s haunting portrait of
a child in military uniform, and in the bronze and wooden sculptures of
Gehard Demetz and Sofie Muller. Helnwein’s doe-eyed child is half in
shadow, one side of the face possibly bruised; the design on her jacket
lapel suggesting a military uniform. Provocatively titled How You Reacted was Right and It is Warmer Now,
Demetz’s toy soldier and placid girl-doll are fixed in place by symbols
of industry and religious worship—a gas can and a crucifix—unconsenting
conscripts into adulthood. For Muller’s Clarysse, the
battlefield is the schoolroom, where seated for eternity at her wooden
desk, she is rendered headless. Some external tragedy or interior
conflict—the boredom, the shame, the struggle to succeed and conform
that may attend those years in school—has erased her visage, her mind,
leaving only an oval shadow burned into the desktop.

Potential trauma awaits the little girl who jumps rope through the
decaying, decadent, and menacing interiors of Laurie Lipton’s Haunted Doll House.
This large-scale, detailed drawing is presented in three dimensions,
offering an immersive vision of the artist’s memories, fears, and
imaginings. Lipton plumbs the depths of her psyche in visions of
domestic terror: here, the everyday rituals of mealtime, playtime, and
bedtime are haunted by shadowy, menacing figures, spider webs, skulls,
liquid and dread oozing through floorboards.

The history and symbolism of marital rituals are both exposed and
transformed in works by Asya Reznikov, Beth Moysés, and Angela
Ellsworth, addressing a broad range of issues within the metaphoric
constraints of tradition. These object-based works reference what brides
have worn and carried to and from the altar, in search of a blessing, a
partner, a new self or new life. Reznikov’s Packing Bride
enacts the nostalgia and anticipation of displacement. Illuminating the
mental and emotional state of transition experienced by immigrants and
travelers, Reznikov fills a suitcase with objects and images that
constitute bridal “necessities”—items that may fulfill the bride’s
desire for material and psychological preparedness as she embarks on a
new life in a new world. The brides featured in Beth Moysés’ still and
moving images are embarking on a transformative journey both physical
and emotional. Reconstructing Dreams creates a new ritual:
female survivors of domestic abuse walk together through the streets of
Montevideo, Uruguay, to the central public square, where they sit and
embroider the patterns of the lines in their hands on their gloves,
discarding their past and wedding themselves to new lives.

The women invoked in Angela Ellsworth’s sculpture, Eliza andEmily,
are bound to each other: the pin-sharp straps of
these19th-century-style bonnets, fashioned from thousands of pearl
corsage pins, are continuous, holding them forever in place, opposing
and supporting one another. A descendant of Mormon prophet Lorenzo Snow,
Ellsworth examines women in the context of fundamentalist Mormonism,
and the ritual, symbolism, and constraint inherent in trappings such as Seer Bonnets.
These unwearable bonnets embody sister wives, representatives of a
still-practiced polygamist tradition of the Fundamentalist Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and reference the prophet Joseph
Smith’s use of “seer stones”—stones he believed to be imbued with divine
power. The circular designs on Ellsworth’s bonnets allude to Smith’s
visionary stones. “The circles are my idea of giving the women wearing
the bonnets their own vision and the possibility of seeing and
translating things.”

Rituals often invoke the collision of innocence and guilt, purity and corruption, life and death. Mohau Modisakeng’s video, Inzilo,
is inspired by a South African mourning tradition, a period of grieving
during which the mourner is committed to wearing black clothing for up
to six to twelve months. A ceremonial disrobing marks the end of
mourning and the transformation of the bereaved; the clothing is burned,
leaving only ashes. A multi-disciplinary artist whose work addresses
the complex history of his country, here Modisakeng performs a
distillation of this ritual, paying homage both to cultural tradition
and to the potential for a rebirth, for transformation.

Artists today appropriate such ritual mise-en-scene to honor or to
expose or subvert a conventional assertion of theological belief. In
Carlos and Jason Sanchez’s Baptism, smiling adults gaze at the
baby as it is christened with blood. Is the image an indictment of
Christian tradition, or an honest envisioning of the rite—the baby
sealed by the blood of Christ? Art historical precedents for such
imagery featured the same cast—Jesus, Mary, apostles, saints, and other
known Biblical characters. For her Pietà, Sam
Taylor-Johnson cast herself as the grieving Madonna, and the actor
Robert Downey, Jr. as the dead Christ. The camera’s shutter cord is
visible, stretching down the steps like a vein, emptying life from the
limp body. While the poses mimic pieta works by Renaissance masters
Michelangelo and Bernini, Taylor-Johnson draws attention not to the
sitters’ assigned roles, but to the artifice on display, and to their
identities, their celebrity—captured and enhanced by camera-wielding
media.

The family portrait is reimagined by Julie Nord, Sebastiaan Bremer,
Hans Op de Beeck, and Robert Pettena; its conventional documentarian
function transformed into illustrations of fantasy, memory, and newly
emerging family structures. The pale, wide-eyed faces in Nord’s pen and
watercolor portraits might belong in a late 19th-century parlor, but for
the color literally dripping from their features. The Niece, Unknown Relative (Wilbur), and A Distant Aunt
evoke Victorian imagery, the world of Charles Adams, the brothers
Grimm, and more: theirs is an eerie family tableau of typologies, not
individuals. Bremer culls personal family albums for images of
youth—here, his and his father’s—applying pen and paint to the surfaces
of these idealized portraits to emphasize both beauty and mortality, as
their ethereal features are disintegrating.

Robert Pettena and Hans Op de Beeck’s videos invite the viewer to a
ritual repast—an outdoor banquet and a series of ceremonial meals—in
which the expected conventions of behavior and time are subverted,
separating a known ritual from recognizable reality. Both humor and
pathos are present in these vivid tableaux of contemporary cultural and
social practices, imbuing the everyday with the import of history, of
myth.

Images of daily domesticity—the rituals of habit and intimacy—reveal a
persistent conflict between self and social norms. Staged in rural,
often bleak settings, Christa Parravani’s imagery narrates her life—a
life she shared intimately with her twin sister. Together, they survived
a difficult, peripatetic childhood to pursue creative careers in which
their visions and voices are deeply intertwined. Parravani’s photographs
of herself and her twin, and of a bride and groom, illustrate the
complex synchronicity of the ties that bind: we seek to be together but
alone, alike but unique. The longing to be both intimate and independent
is also enacted by the couple riding nowhere on leonardogillesfleur’s Irreconcilable Differences,
demonstrating how we long for change and consistency at once, and how
individual drives may conflict with the structural norms of a sanctioned
union.

Indeed, all intimate relationships are subject to change from internal and exterior forces. In her Farmer’s Daughter Cycle, Lauren
Argo performs a dreamlike homage to the complex life cycle of her
family’s small tobacco farm. For generations, her elders’ dependence on
the land formed traditions and responsibilities that engendered both
masculine and feminine roles for each family member. As she enacts the
shifting identities of a tobacco worker, daughter, and sister, Argo
performs a process of self-inquiry at work in many lifelong laborers as
the source of their livelihood and heritage runs dry.

Legacy also informs Chris Radtke’s Progeny (2) pink, a nylon
mesh sculpture that is both a representational and abstract portrait of
her granddaughter, scaled to the child’s four-year old body. The
diaphanous material evokes sacramental garments (a veil, a shroud),
while the geometry of the form invokes an art-historical reference to
Minimalism. Created in Radtke’s studio, Progeny is the off-spring of both self and art, body and mind, a dual portrait of artist and subject.

Lived experience of human family dynamics—and the social and
political institutions born of traditional patriarchy—often combines
dependence and destruction. Josephine Taylor’s large-scale Bomb Landscape series
depicts women and babies, men and animals, set in a post-apocalyptic
world, vying for sustenance and survival. Their delicately drawn forms
are imposing and formidable; undefined fear and ferocity animates these
compelling scenes. “My drawings rely on their purity to attract the
viewer,” explains the artist, “and then abuse that power by revealing
something terrifying. The omnipresence of violence in my work emphasizes
the partnership between love and hatred that I experienced growing up.”
Taylor’s bodies merge and mutate, their fluids flow freely out and
between them; modern-day madonnas spurt milk like stigmata, redefining
the mythology of maternal nurture as costly sacrifice.

Reimagining tradition creates opportunities for identity to transcend
the constraints of ritual and role-play, especially within the crucible
of childhood wherein the self is first formed. Laetitia Soulier
describes the characters in her Matryoshka series as
approximately eight years old, at a point where thoughts shift
seamlessly between the real and imagined, the rational and fantastical.
Deployed into dream-like spaces where they appear larger than life in
comparison to the miniature objects that surround them, the girls are at
once stand-ins for characters in a dark fairytale and playful children.
These environments, says Soulier, are “their toy, their home, their
childhood, their adulthood, the space between their past and their
future.” Inspired by 19th-century Russian Matryoshka nesting
dolls, whose stackable shapes follow a telescoping mathematical pattern,
Soulier’s visions of girlhood suggest that consciousness and identity
are always in flux.

Carrie Mae Weems adopts and updates Classical Greek mythology in May Flowers,
a trio of beribboned African American girls, framed in tondo,
Renaissance-style as three contemporary graces. The central figure’s
gaze is direct and frontal: their roles—as muses and more—are neither
imposed nor fixed, but self-asserted, reframing, reclaiming the stage of
art history. Weems’ seminal Kitchen Table Series presents
domestic drama as the central stage for re-envisioning gender and family
roles, with the artist cast in the center, empowered to embody,
represent, and speak for a breadth of humanity:

“I use myself simply as a vehicle for approaching the question of
power. It is never about me; it’s always about something larger,” says
the artist. “I use my own constructed image as a vehicle for questioning
ideas about the role of tradition, the nature of family, monogamy,
polygamy, relationships between men and women, between women and
children, and between women and other women—underscoring the critical
problem and the possible resolves.”

Daily rituals and communal rites continue to shape identity and define the politics of family and society; in OFF-SPRING, transformations of iconic imagery from spheres both sacred and profane generate a new power, the power of potential and change.